Chapter Thirty One.
Contains the Conclusion
I repeated my question, looking straight into her face.
“Your friend, Eric Domville.”
“Eric!” I gasped, starting forward. “Why, he told me that you had killed him. He described in detail how he had been an eye-witness of your crime!”
“Ah, of course!” she said, bitterly. “In order to throw suspicion off himself. But I swear to you, before Heaven, that it was he who killed Arthur Rumbold – they killed him because they knew he had discovered the truth concerning the house in Clipstone Street. Among Vickers’s effects Arthur had found certain letters which had given him the clue to the awful truth. Your friend Domville was, you will remember, often absent for long periods in Africa. But I now have reason for knowing that he lived in Paris with Vickers as agent of the gang, and sometimes up in Manchester, where he passed as Charles Denton. Some of his absences from his friends, too, were due to certain periods of imprisonment which he had, from time to time, served. He was not the real Eric Domville, the African traveller, for the latter has his home in Cape Town, and had not been in London for twelve years or so.”
“Sybil,” I faltered, “what you have just revealed to me places an entirely new complexion upon the astounding affair. I see now how cleverly Domville planned to cast the guilt of Arthur Rumbold’s death upon you. I found upon him the letters you had written to Vickers, and naturally concluded that the dead man was a scoundrel and a blackmailer. Besides, he wore your miniature and there was in my mind no question that you had loved him. Therefore I took counsel with Domville, and we agreed to keep your secret. Ah!” I cried, “how cleverly I was deceived! I ought to have detected that he was not my old friend Eric. That man was possessed of the devil’s cunning! But tell me, why did you fly that night – why did you ask me to pose as your husband?”
“For the simple reason that, appalled by the vengeance that they had dealt out to poor Arthur, I sought to escape them. Domville might accuse me of the murder in the wood, or Vickers might give my secret to the Prefect of Paris Police. In either case I would be in deadly peril. I saw one way out of the latter – which seemed to me the secret mode by which they would eventually attack me – and that was to make pretence that I had a husband – that I had hidden myself and married a working-man.”
“Why? How did that safeguard you?”
“Because I had discovered that by marriage a woman follows her husband’s nationality, so that if I married you I should at once become a British subject, and beyond the influence of French law,” was her frank answer. “Don’t you remember that while we were in the north two men called at Neate Street, made inquiries about us, and went away satisfied. They were agents of the French Police, and from what Mrs Williams told them they believed that you were my husband, therefore they went away, hesitating to apply for my arrest. So you see Vickers actually carried out his threat. Since the day after poor Arthur was killed Vickers has been in Germany to dispose of a quantity of stolen jewellery, therefore Domville had no opportunity of telling him the truth that you were posing as my husband, while your friend on his part deemed it to their interests to allow us both to remain in fear and in hiding. Of course I had no knowledge that Domville was aware of your having assumed the character of William Morton, and our position has all along been rendered the more perilous on that account. For us, however, it was most fortunate that Vickers has been abroad and that Domville kept his knowledge to himself. By your aid, Wilfrid, I was saved from those French agents, but now that the secret of Clipstone Street is out I fear that they may discover I am not married, and return. If they do,” she sighed, “if they do, then I must stand in a criminal dock, and bear the scandal that these villains have heaped upon me in order to hold me as their unwilling accomplice. Ah! Wilfrid!” she gasped, terrified, “I shudder when I think of the awful doom of those unfortunate ones about whom I once gave secret information so innocently. It is horrible – horrible,” and she covered her drawn, haggard countenance with her slim, white hands.
“Never shall I forget that moment when poor Arthur Rumbold fell dead at my feet – shot down mercilessly because he was in the act of revealing to me the terrible truth,” she cried. “The memory of that ghastly moment lives ever within me – the dead face still stares at me, and I never seem able to get away from it. He had an intuition that his enemies, having found out that he had discovered the grim secret of the house in Clipstone Street, were following him with the intention of killing him in secret. They had obtained his photograph, and intended that he should die. Therefore, knowing that he was followed he had come, ill-dressed and disguised, by a circuitous route to Charlton Wood. Naturally the police, when they found him dead, believed him to be a tramp, while I, of course, was in hourly terror that the letters he had secured from Vickers’s rooms and my miniature, which I knew he wore, would be found upon him, and thus connect me with the crime. In breathless dread I existed for days and days, and never knew until now that you had secured them prior to the arrival of the police.”
“You addressed in cipher a message in an advertisement to someone whom you called ‘Nello,’” I said. “Who was he?”
“The man John Parham. He had always expressed pity for me. To the others he was known as Nello, his real name being Lionel. I was mistaken, however. He was no better than the others. The cipher they had given to me in order that I could communicate with them in secret if occasion demanded.”
At six o’clock that same evening, after Sybil had returned to her mother’s house in Grosvenor Street, I entered the Tottenham Court Road Police Station, and there found Pickering anxiously awaiting me.
“I wasn’t far wrong, Mr Hughes,” he exclaimed quickly. “Parham came to Clipstone Street just before noon, and dropped into Nicholls’ hands. Winsloe somehow got wind of the affair, and has bolted – on his way to the Continent, probably. We’ve circulated his description and hope to get him. But he’s a wily bird, it seems, from all accounts. Your friend Domville was a pretty tough customer, too,” he added.
“Why? I don’t quite follow you.”
“Well, when I got back here and went to his cell I found him stone dead. He’d poisoned himself! Swallowed a strychnine pill.”
“Because he was the murderer of Arthur Rumbold,” I answered. “Miss Burnet will later on explain everything.”
“H’m,” he grunted. “A pretty complicated bit of business, when all the threads are gathered up.”
There were still a few other matters to investigate, I pointed out, and an hour later we went out to Sydenham Hill, and there saw Mrs Parham and Miss O’Hara. When we told the poor lady of her husband’s arrest, and the charge against him, she fainted. Then, presently, when she came to, she confessed that soon after her marriage she had had certain suspicions aroused, for she discovered that her husband was wanted by the French police for some offence committed in Bordeaux. The secret cavity had been made in the drawing-room floor by him, and in it he kept his private papers. Her own opinion was that the agents of French police wanted to search there for certain evidence, the evidence of that gruesome eye, no doubt, but knowing that no English magistrate would grant them a search-warrant they resolved to make a raid on the place, as though they were thieves. Though they overlooked the strange eye which, with some ulterior motive Parham had preserved, they nevertheless secured sufficient evidence to warrant them in applying for the man’s extradition for the murder of a banker at Bordeaux, which indeed the French Consulate-General had done three weeks previously. Miss O’Hara, it appeared, had accidentally discovered the cipher hidden behind a heavy wardrobe in one of the bedrooms, and by its means had read my messages and gone to Baker Street and to Dean’s Yard out of sheer curiosity.
Surely I need not dwell upon the boundless delight with which poor, ill-judged and helpless Sybil was hailed on her return to Grosvenor Street, or the sensation when that same evening in the drawing-room, before her mother, Jack, Cynthia and Lord Wydcombe, she repeated the whole of the strange circumstances, just as she had related them to me.
Jack was furious, for he saw how cleverly he had been fleeced by Ellice Winsloe, while I, on my part, turned to the little love of my youth, saying frankly, —
“As Tibbie seems to be still in fear that the French police may apply for her extradition on account of the sale of the naval secret to our Admiralty, she may be inclined to change her nationality in real earnest. She can do this by marriage, easier than by letters of naturalisation, and as we are man and wife and poor in the eyes of Camberwell, so, if Tibbie consents, will we become the same in the eyes of Society.”
For answer she clung to me quickly with a cry of joy, and allowed me to kiss away the tears from her dear face, while Jack clapped me heartily upon the shoulder and said, —
“Wilfrid, old fellow! It’s just as it should be. Tibbie’s loved you for years. Everybody who wasn’t blind has seen that. You’ve saved her, and you’ve a right to her.”
And five minutes later my well-beloved and I were receiving the congratulations of the whole family.
What else need I say?
To tell you that we are now living in our pretty rose-embowered home near Amersham, in Buckinghamshire, which Lady Scarcliff bought and gave to Tibbie as a wedding present, and that we are supremely happy in each other’s love is only to tell you what you already know. The smart set know Tibbie no more, for she is content with her simple, healthful country life. And she is all in all to me – my love.
Winsloe, who has been traced to Buenos Ayres, has not yet been arrested, although Pickering is still confident of success, but Parham and Vickers are now awaiting trial on the very serious charges of blackmail, robbery and murder. Very little evidence was given before the magistrate at Bow Street, but at the next sessions of the Central Criminal Court, London will surely be startled by the sensational evidence which the police will give concerning that grim dark house in Clipstone Street – the House of Doom.
Death sentences await both prisoners, without a doubt.
“Whatsoever a Man Soweth, that shall he also Reap.”